Abundance
When you no longer have to survive, your energy is free for creativity and discovery.
Why this matters to me
I have often seen scarcity turn smart, kind people anxious and harsh. I don't think that's their nature. I think it's their circumstances.
When you are worrying about rent and what happens next month, there is almost no attention left for anything else. Scarcity drains mental energy, narrows your horizon and triggers ancient reactions: grab, protect, don't give it up.
I'm curious what would happen if this burden were lifted from everyone at once. Not so that people stop working, but so that they start doing the things that make a long life worth living.
Questions I ask myself
What would you do if you didn't have to earn a living?
Which needs drain the most of your mental energy?
Why does scarcity make us worse than we really are?
Can I be well if the people around me are not?
I consider the last question the most important one in this whole direction.
My position
Basic needs for everyone
Food, water, housing, health, communication and knowledge can become available to everyone. Not because everyone has to live the same way, but because automation, cheap energy and sensible organization of resources make all of this cheaper every year.
Peter Diamandis describes abundance as an achievable state: many things that used to be rare are already almost free. The question is how to carry this process through to the basic conditions of life.
A high unconditional income
It is an idea discussed today by everyone from economists to Elon Musk: when machines produce most of the goods, every person could have an income that is enough not just to survive but to live with dignity.
I don't reduce abundance to this alone. It is one mechanism among others, alongside automated production, affordable infrastructure and shared use of resources. But it shows the scale well: we are talking about a world where no one has to spend their life just surviving.
When you no longer have to survive, you finally ask yourself what you actually want.
Scarcity as a cause of aggression
Much of what gets called "human nature" — greed, envy, the urge to grab — is triggered by lack. Remove scarcity, and these reactions have far fewer reasons to arise. I don't think they will disappear on their own, but conditions shape which of them turn into habits.
Abundance is never just personal
If I'm doing well while people around me suffer, something in the design is off. My well-being depends on the people nearby, on my environment, on the society I live in. So compassion, for me, is not morality handed down from above but a practical tool: it is how shared prosperity grows, and I benefit from it too.
This idea is close to the Buddhist notion of compassion, though I came to it from another direction — through systems. In any system, the weakest link limits the whole.
Horizons
Not a forecast, but the direction I want to move in
Now
Automation and AI are making knowledge, communication and many services cheaper. Unconditional income pilots in different countries are producing their first data.
Nearer
Basic needs are met in some regions and communities. A high unconditional income is discussed as real policy rather than utopia.
Far
No one lives with the kind of scarcity that triggers aggression and grabbing. The freed-up energy goes into creativity, research and caring for others.
Thinkers and Books
Thinkers
- Peter Diamandis Technology makes the rare accessible: abundance is a direction, not a dream.
- Elon Musk Musk has said more than once that when AI and robots take over work, we will need not a minimal income but a universal high income: there will be so many goods and services that work becomes a choice rather than a necessity.
Books
- «Abundance» Why the future may turn out better than we think, and which technologies are leading there.
- «Utopia for Realists» Basic income, open borders and a fifteen-hour work week — with numbers and history.
Related
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